Clicking noise you said?

Why is the hard drive making this clicking noise?

We know now, it is because the System Area cannot be read. You can have 4 main reasons (and a possible combination of them) for this to happen:

Heads are damaged

For heads and preamplificator…well you only have a choice which is to swap the head of your drive. This is where it gets expensive in terms of data recovery services. Head swapping should be done in a clean room ISO 5, but if you are skilled enough you can try it in a clean environment if you don’t plan to spend money anyway on your data. Head issue is very common if you dropped your external hard drive for example.

Preamplificator is dead

SA corrupted or scratched

If the SA is scratched you might have a shot through a live pcb swap. It will basically bypass the reading of the SA and you have a cheap shot at getting your data back.

Firmware on the PCB

For firmware issue on your PCB, a PCB swap is the operation you should be looking at. This is doable by most individual thus not that simple,as you need to move components of the old PCB to the new one.